A great majority of Americans are fucked fucked fucked. The demise of the defined-benefit pension and the failure to increase and expand Social Security during a conversion to defined-contribution 401k-type retirement plans is the next big catastrophe to plague the United States--and it is coming faster than many think. We are gonna have to do a shitload of on-the-fly creations and expansion of public pensions, but most certainly will only do that AFTER the problem gets as bad as it can be; it would be a great idea to dismantle the 401k laws and do whatever necessary to put all that money into passively-managed public retirement plans which KEEPS THE MONEY AWAY FROM THE BANKSTERS. Again, this will not happen until the suffering peaks because that's the American way.

Another fun fact: since almost nobody in the 99% will be able to afford to retire, they keep working till they die and keep younger workers from getting those jobs, thus keeping the unemployment rate higher than it should be. Fan-fucking-tastic.

I'm trying to arrange a gift for a kid (not mine, but mine had the idea) of a pink mini Strat, and of course, the local Fender shop can't get 'em for a while because of some bullshit with something. Dammit. I try to do right by the local guys, but they are fucking killing me.

Monday, December 30, 2013

Will 2014 be the year Palestine finally replaces Israel in the middle east? Nope, probably not, but the brave freedom fighters in Palestine, especially the secular ones, should be given every possible support in replacing the fundamentalist apartheid state of Israel with a democratic Palestine in a single-state solution where every man and woman is guaranteed civil and voting rights regardless of their personal belief system.

Apparently, Republicans go to Jupiter to get more stupider. Evolution is one of those things that scares the shit of fundie teabagger assholes, but those of us who have more than a couple of brain cells to rub together don't worry too much about it; the question is settled for anybody who gets it, atmo. Science is only hard if you are fucking idiot, as the rank and file Republicans prove every gods-damned day.

Jesus, comedy is hard. It must be because this wasn't funny. Wouldn't Jennifer Aniston be the world's oldest stripper? She looked as fake as the fake rubber snake-bit frank and beans. Please don't have strippers in your movie without nudity. That's just dumb. With this flick, the director Rawson Marshall Thurber has proven he is fully qualified to be the terrible and unfunny Judd Apatow's piss boy. At best, We're the Millers was like From Dusk till Dawn without Clooney and Tarantino, Up in Smoke without the dopey comedy, and What Alice Found without the good parts.

The Daily Beast is generally awful, but this piece of filler is pretty fun. Rourke sounds like he has his shit together at last, and Morrissey was clearly an insufferable ass since day one. Stiffing the other guys on the money is especially ugly. The only way to run a band is equal shares for everyone: share royalties and performance and tour earnings and expenses equally. The post-Smiths years have proven that Morrissey and Marr were never as good without Rourke and Joyce; it was kinda a major fuck-up to kill that cash cow so quickly. This is an interesting comparison with the way John Lydon treats the people he works with; Lydon cultivated this character of a snotty, insufferable asshole but was honest and fair, while Morrissey really was a snotty, insufferable asshole.

And it's not just Fox "News". In the wake of the big Timesstory, the bugfuck crazy teabagging fuckwads have lost their shit, as seen at the evil and the stupid backwaters of interwebs insanity. Read some of the comments if you have the gumption, and consider that these are the people out their taking up space and wasting oxygen and carrying guns around your children and house pets. Happy New Year, boys and girls.

Not sleeping too much was not too much of a problem for the most part, but it sure as shit meant that Dillon was clear headed--or at least what passed for lucid for him at any given time--and awake too often to talk to manic-depressive diva's like Jay Kramer when he should have been sleeping. Or something. Evie was good for that. Having her in his bed helped him sleep nicely; fucking her was even more effective. He was constantly, mostly constantly, sometimes, wondering how much he should be doing with her, but everything so far had been pretty successful, considering, and Evie was certainly not shy with sharing details and taking about her sexuality. He understood, sorta, how she was feeling, and how she was a little bit, maybe way more than a little bit, confused, confounded, whatever, and also feeling a little bit betrayed. And alone, probably, far from home. Dillon knew that Evie was a bit let down by her friend Lily--or was feeling that way, anyway--because Lily had apparently been acting out with men, boys, and having lots and lots of normal, straight, sex. This was the Lily who had brought Evie out here more than anyone else, the Lily who had been a fuck bunny in high school and then a purported queer warrior fucking other chicks, blah, blah, blah, who was now getting the dick regularly. After Evie's last two years, it was probably really weird; Dillon would cop to that. Evie wasn't a fuck bunny in high school; Tom was still not sure how much she'd ever been with a guy, and she was fucking 24 now. She was celibate gay in high school, more or less. She was involved with another student back at home in California, but Dillon wasn't sure how much sex they really had. Then there was the big two years off, working with the band her sister's girlfriend was in, with a serious relationship. Still, it was odd for Dillon because Evie was still talking about how many people she had kissed in her life. That was fucked up for a 24 year old woman in college. And was that serious relationship with a woman who had a boyfriend who was not out on the road with them? Some shit like that. As usual, he should have been paying more attention. But whatever. She was just a shy person, with shit like that, he guessed, because she was fucking hot and got wet as fuck from his slightest touch. He'd found her soaking, dripping, no matter how quickly he got between her legs. She loved to kiss, and even if she seemed unfamiliar with dicks, she was more than accommodating, more than...he didn't know what. She seemed pretty fucking horny. She just hadn't fooled around much, he guessed.

And sometimes, in flashes of lucid decency, Dillon was disgusted with himself. It didn't matter if he looked 20 and felt 200; he was 37 fucking years old. He needed to get the fuck out of this town. He needed to decide whether to hide in plain sight or run to some shitty backwater hideout and play out the string. Yes, he had been lucky to make it through the last four years and had done well wasting this much time. Sure he had been lusting after that curvy blonde for a couple of years, but Dillon was much more comfortable with Eva when she appeared to be treating him as an object. He wasn't sure he was able to commit even the effort needed to get to know her, and he was pretty sure he didn't want to. Not Providence. Not Santa Fe. Boulder. Boulder was the key. It was not good to stay here, get a job with the state or one of the clowns practicing small law in town. Really, Dillon suspected he should in fact take Joe Fallon up on his offer and plan to waste some time in New York or Washington. No fucking way he was going to take a position in California--working in the same office where Justine had been a partner?--fucking Los Angeles again?--but if he played that out, he could easily spend a half dozen years arousing no suspicion of anything and then just bolt to Boulder or Perth or wherever.

Then, the short-term stimulus should continue with an expansion of food stamps and social security right away in order to get this economy going. In the intermediate term, a big boost in the minimum wage will act as a stimulus to create jobs.

I think Walt Brasch is fucking around with his praise for NCIS, but bringing up Jim Garner clouds it a bit. I mean, NCIS? Really? No fucking way. Wasn't NCIS a spin-off of JAG, the show where the guy was a Navy lawyer and SEAL and F-18 pilot and Naval Intelligence officer and shit who saved the world every week in 44 minutes? I never actually saw it, but I heard from a reliable source that old ladies loved JAG the same way they used to love Magnum P.I. Is NCIS really the top show on the tee vee in America? I've never seen that show either, but I get the feeling we're fucking fucked if that is what is popular. NCIS? Jeez.

It's fine to rag on MSNBC for Obama fluffing, but the big deal is that the fucking channel is half prison fetish videos; unless and until the network commits to being an actual news channel with 24 hour news and opinion programming with decent tee vee people like, say, Keith Olbermann and Alec Baldwin--even if they puss out and continue the pathetic Obama fluffing as the main theme--they can't even pretend to being anything other than an NBC company garbage dump.

The Dr. Who special was pretty awful. I had no use for Matt Smith, but Jenna Coleman has really been getting better, and neither of them had much to do in the show. I was pretty stoked to see the Paul McGann webisode at the beginning of the 50th repeat, though; that was cool. Probably not the opening you expected. Long before last night, we had seen way too many Dr. Who stories where the Doctor faces all the enemies at once but nothing too interesting happens. It's past time to see the Doctor in stories that aren't about titanic existential battles, and instead are compelling and entertaining stories on a more believable scale. Maybe the new guy is up to it in ways Matt Smith never could have been, and we will get some Dr. Who that is not so annoying and dumb.

Utah is usually the shittiest of shitty places, full of cocksuckers like Mitt Romney, but this gay marriage thing out there just keeps on gettin' better! This should be the end of the mindless marriage bigotry in the U.S.; now let's see some Dems out there in the rest of the fucking country hop on this bandwagon and win some gods-damned elections with this issue!

Sunday, December 22, 2013

I know they spent a shitload more money on this thing, but I'm not sure it shows. Once again, the interesting stories are not told, and we are stuck following the least likable and least interesting of the parts. It is still hard to suspend disbelief and have the people in the movie living in such a purportedly brutal and violent milieu without blood, swearing, passion, or sex. Katniss and Peeta and Gale are in their late teens, facing death, and yet they comport themselves like bizarrely immature oversized fourth graders. An even passingly realistic Hunger Games flick would look like something of a mashup of Quentin Tarantino and Sam Peckinpah making a movie in 1971. Definitely not for the kiddoes, and definitely not a cash cow. The funnest thing in this film was Donald Sutherland looking like a hungry version of John Entwistle.

Seems pretty mild, really. Make no mistake, Hall & Oates are sublimely awful, and despite the fish-in-a-barrel aspect, it is always useful and right to shit on the likes of Hall & Oates, Billy Joel, Huey Lewis & The News...

Thursday, December 19, 2013

The person shooting this video should be shot, or at least beaten until they learn how to use the gods-damned zoom. The sound from these shitty little cameras is surprisingly good though, especially considering this particular show was outside.

So, Governor Julian BashirMartin Bashir Steve Beshear of Kentucky has the ACA working pretty well in his state thanks to Raylan Givens a solid state exchange and the Medicaid expansion, and that has made things extra tough for Mitch McConnell who is trying to hold onto his seat. He's gonna get buttfucked by the teabagger running to his right in the primary, but the Democrat Alison Grimes--who is nothing special coming from a shitty rock-ribbed conservative Democratic establishment family, but it will be fun to watch Bitch McConnell lose--will be able to hammer him from the other side with the Obamacare successes in the state, so even if McConnell survives his primary, the Democrats should have an excellent chance of dispatching the current Minority Leader thanks to Gov. Beshear.

I can say unequivocally that this shit is the sort of stuff we never hear muchenough anything about in the United States; we don't talk about native people in North America, and we sure as shit don't talk about the native people anywhere else. When Mandela died, the media was happy to make it sound like apartheid was ancient history, fixed, done, over, okay, bye-bye. John Pilger has been talking and writing about the treatment of the first people for decades; the problem is not ancient history, and it is not going away. We have been able to hide from these crimes for generations, but until we talk and debate and understand the history, our societies will continue to be fucked.

Craven fucking weasel should not have apologized. He was 100% on target. This is fucking Obama, though, as well. Obama should have had one of his surrogates with plausible deniability take up this theme and shout it all over the gods-damned tee vee to put the fucking Republicans on their heels, but no, nobody has the balls.

Before the two-hour mark, I had just given up. This flick looked kinda cheap and flat, and there was so much tedious filler material that I just didn't care with about an hour to go. This Hobbit movie was too tiresome and tiring to be enjoyable; it woulda been way better to leave it as that stupid cartoon.

His politics and support for Palestine are pretty fucking solid. I knew that he was living in the United States these days, and he has been pretty up front in his views, which is good. I like Roger Waters way more than I like most of his music. Gilad Atzmon checks in to respond to the shit Waters has taken over his views. Waters sounds like a pretty decent dude; if more of our rich and powerful artist types were as well-informed as Waters, maybe our would be a smidge better.

Monday, December 16, 2013

You know it's coming. If Pope Francis keeps up his startlingly (for a gods-damned fucking pope, anyway) progressive agenda, it can't be long until he begins a world tour where he personally visits each of the biggest reactionary Catholic assholes on the planet and smacks each one of 'em on the head. For Jesus. And fun. Fuck yeah!

Sunday, December 15, 2013

Nowhere else on Earth where we have good Christian civilized white people would we also have no new radical laws to prevent another Newtown shooting after a year has gone by. Any other place living in the light of Jesus' love would have protected its children from gun death. Any other decent country would have pulled its head out of its ass, given up on the self-deluding, idiot religious bullshit and faced gods-damned reality. America is clearly incapable of rational action. We can't manage an economy. We can't figure out how to deliver health care. And we can't keep our citizens safe from gun violence. It really is time for national suicide, but we're too dumb as a group to be properly ashamed.

Saturday, December 14, 2013

What the hell was wrong with James Woods in this movie? He looked like some punter wearing a cheap James Woods rubber mask. Jeez. White House terrorist movies are awful, and this movie has at least three times as much awful than necessary. The entire daughter and ex-wife thing was pointless and added to the awful. The vice president stuff was worthless and added even more to the awful. Sticking to the core story and Jamie Foxx riffing on Obama would not have made a good, believable, or entertaining movie, but at least it would have shown that they were trying.

Friday, December 13, 2013

He's gotta be like a hundred, right? I mean, it would be nice if Newhart really slammed these Legatus assholes at their own event or went super public in refusing to appear with frothy bigots like Rick Santorum, but I don't have much faith that Newhart is up to that sort of genius at this point.

Jesus and Santa update: Megyn Kelly is a racist dipshit! First off, Jesus is a fairy tale, but if the Jesus of the fairy tails was a real guy, he sure as fuck was not white for christ's sake! Jesus would have looked like the average Palestinian, Jordanian, Lebanese native of today. Second, how the fuck does Megyn Kelly know Santa was white? What a fucking moran.

The majority of the Congress should have, you know, their heads on pikes over this utterly insane failure to extend unemployment benefits. Set aside the human suffering and fuckheaded cruelty of denying basic assistance to unemployed workers in a time of admitted 7% unemployment--which with record low labor participation, underemployment, forced part-time schedules, and criminally low wages is probably more effectively an actual 15-20% unemployment rate--the macroeconomic consequences of refusing to extend benefits are horrible. This is the shit that will hurt the fucking Koch Brothers and the retards in the Walton family, along with local communities and everyone who earns or spends money. Hell, if the assholes in congress didn't pass a budget at all and ONLY extended unemployment benefits AND increased food stamps, that would have been an almost best-case scenario. Not extending unemployment benefits in this economy solely because too many Republicans can only achieve an erection when they imagine black and brown people suffering and their children going hungry is stupid economic policy, and if the Dems and Republicans can't understand this basic concept, then they have no business being in any positions of power, so line up Erik Loomis's spare pikes, and when you are done get some new congress critters and a new president who have more than two brain cells to rub together.

I kinda thought that Peggy Bundy would just shoot that horrible Tara and be done with it, so the fork to the back of the head repeatedly was quite the lovely surprise. The strongest parts of this past season were the guest stars--along with keeping Kim Coates around--while the overarching story is becoming less and less important and more and more goofy because the action and mayhem clearly are where the entertainment is. Everybody is awful and everybody dies on this show, and that's perfect.

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

One. A car. A low-production Sweden-only internet car, built from old Saab leftovers. Something is really weird about this; it feels off. The purpose of this company, such as it is, is to build electric cars for government fleet sales in China, but those cars will be built in China, so what is the deal with this "Saab" enterprise in Sweden? Strange. It has been clear that NEVS had no plans to build Saab cars in any recognizable sense and sell them in the strongest Saab markets like the UK and U.S. and Canada. It smells like a scam or some sort of government misdirection, but I can't see what the payoff would be.

Dan Rather is and always has been a weird little dude, but he is completely correct that his George W. Bush story was 100% true and the rock-ribbed conservative establishment media helped Bush's people ruin the story. That's a fact, jackoff. Rather's a fucking dipshit when it comes to Lara Logan, however. Logan is part of the exact same hard-right conservative media that decided Rather was too close to the truth to keep his reputation. Asshole.

Monday, December 9, 2013

Happy Frakking Holidays, Motherfrakkers. The Rude Pundit gets all kissy with holidaze spirts today over poverty and cruelty and capitalism and all the other traditional christmas cheer, ending with this story of a homeless girl in the richest city in the history of the universe. That's a for realz christmas miracle right there; poverty is a feature of economy--and our economy is an artificial construct that exists only because the beneficiaries fight and kill every second of every day to maintain it. We could have any sort of economy a person could imagine, but this particular economy will not go away until those bricks get used for something other than building buildings. Homelessness, unemployment, suffering are evil, and in our unimaginably wealthy nation, completely unnecessary. Until each and every one of us understands, we are doomed to this atrocity.

If Jacobs is right, and the legacy of Nelson Mandela is not the neoliberal post-apartheid South Africa, but is instead the continuation of Mandela and the ANC's struggle to bring true economic and political and social freedom to Africa and the world, well then I would be over the moon. Jacob's thesis that the true followers of Mandela have never lost the true focus of the struggle and also never believed that the struggle was concluded with the end of the apartheid laws and the election of Mandela to South Africa's presidency is an attractive one. We can hope. The bad guys are very powerful, however, and they are doing everything they can to weaken the legacy of Mandela in which Jacobs has faith. He's right in saying that we have no one to blame but ourselves now.

The tee vee people must be wicked pissed that the Browns got butt-fucked by the refs in that game. That has to be a no-call in that game. I mean, it's Cleveland for christ's sake! Haven't they suffered enough?

Saturday, December 7, 2013

I guess my expectations were sufficiently low for once, because when I saw this thing, I was not completely horrified. The current Camaro has aged horribly--what looked maybe not so bad at first is fucking terrible in person now, with those weird little slit windows and bloated, bulky sheet metal; hell, it makes that mid-2000's Pontiac GTO car look fucking wonderful in comparison. This new Mustang, though, while not great, may turn out to be not so bad, especially in a 300+ hp turbo 4; that's wicked fucking Euro shit right there. I guess we'll see what they're like for realz when they go on sale. Six-speed proper manual transmissions still available, apparently, so that's something.

Friday, December 6, 2013

Apparently this Dylan Jones guy knew Dammers, and he does a nice fucking job with this. "Nelson Mandela" is catchy as hell and was probably the first time millions of people first heard the man's name. I was never the biggest 2 Tone fan in the world or anything, but I agree that Dammers wrote a whole lot of truly great songs and certainly deserves a higher profile than he has.

Martin Bashir is an uber-douche, but he did and said nothing wrong with regard to Sarah Palin and should not have been canned. MSNBC is a bumbling shit show. Bashir sucked, but if they didn't fire him last year, there was no reason to fire him over Palin. Alec Baldwin is a hothead and a dick, but if you want to hire him, then stand behind him when he acts like the hothead and dick you hired. Ed Schultz should never have apologized to that right-wing whore Laura Ingraham. Olbermann was the rock around which the network should have been constructed and keeping him should have been the absolute top priority. MSNBC isn't the liberal Fox "News". MSNBC is not liberal, and it is not news. It is a hapless and hopeless shit show.

This disgusting nugget of American history has been getting a shitton of play since the announcement of Nelson Mandela's death. Reagan--more like his handlers since Reagan was pretty much a brain-dead carcass during his entire presidency--and the rest of those unapologetic racist assholes hated the thought of South Africa falling into the hands of the blacks. Here you can see Reagan whipping out all of his D-list acting chops to prevent the United States from getting on the right side of history where South Africa was concerned. Dick Cheney, he hated Mandela in 1986, and he's still around. And many of the slightly younger Republican leaders today hated Mandela back then and still hated him on the day he died. All you have to do is watch the Republicans play up the politics of race hatred in 2013 as much as they did in 1986 or 1850.

This fuckin' rocks. Dumb-as-a-post Senator Teabagger Ted Cruz posts an anodyne message after Nelson Mandela's death, and the racist teabagging cocksuckers who make up his voting base go apoplectic. Unreconstructed racist insanity is a feature and not a bug of Republican politics.

Thursday, December 5, 2013

The over-enthusiastic hagiography has already started, and I would imagine that the fusillade of opprobrium, some of it certainly warranted, will begin after dawn. Regardless, Mandela the idea had an enormous impact on recent human history. What was best about Mandela the idea--maybe second best after the hope he gave to so many people--was the fear he provoked in the west, in the racist reactionaries in the United States and Europe. That was a beautiful thing. Mandela the revolutionary was most successful as a prisoner. Mandela the president was. South Africa persisted under Mandela--he didn't burn it down or paint the streets with blood--and while apartheid as law was ended, economic and social apartheid continued essentially unabated for many. Still, he was a tough bastard. He rightly took up arms. He survived his prison sentence. He maintained the idea of Nelson Mandela to the best of his abilities even though he knew the realities of post official apartheid South Africa. Whatever passes for peace in death, Mandela has that now.

Crooks and Liars does a nice job with a succinct and joyful fisking. This is well-trod, but as O'Reilly hasn't gone away and gets fucking loonier with every turn of the day, it is always good to savage his rancid bullshit.

The self-appointed insider "expert" huffs and fluffs for his dinner. Yes, a single-payer plan would have been politically impossible in 2008--would it have been worth it to give up on the clusterfuck we have in 2013 and push the single-payer concept into prominence during a vigorous political battle?--and Obama's primary goals were one, a political victory over Republicans and, two, to benefit the for-profit insurance industry. I'll say it again and again and again: there is no and never has been any support for a single-payer in the Democratic establishment. If the Democrats want to win on health care then make single-payer a plank in the platform. A generation was wasted after Clinton's failure, and it will be at least another generation until we get a chance to properly reform health care on a national level after Obama's failure. All these dickwads pretending that the ACA was a necessary compromise are letting you down by failing to acknowledge that the the ACA was exactly the sort of insurance industry welfare program which was the goal of Democratic health care reform from the beginning.

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Ugh, the Wolverine character in movies is such a mess at this point. Jackman is at least a foot too tall and 20 years too old to be Logan, especially since they feel the need to keep repeating how the Wolverine doesn't age. Logan might not age, but Hugh Jackman sure as shit does. Overall, this flick feels confused and disconnected. The two lead actresses are lovely to look at, but that doesn't make up for the totality of the cliched and low-energy production.

Like maybe that Fairly Oddparents kid. Or Cartman. The decisions would be pretty much the same, and cartoon characters are not known for brilliant long-term strategic planning. The Yankees have resources, but without a solid plan and a clear direction, well, you get what you get. Ellsbury? Really? Good job, Cartman.

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Undoubtedly the high point of Man of Steel was the appearance of Helo and Gaeta. Surely there was room in this flick for Tigh, Tyrol, Doc Cottle, Cally, and the rest; replacing the cast of this movie with people from BG would have been a step up from the hilarious lack of chemistry between the Limey and Lois Lane. There should be a law against having both Russel Crowe and Kevin Costner in the same film. Superman is a stupid idea, too stupid to make a good movie when you have no idea who Superman is and the hows and whys of his abilities, and an especially stupid idea when you follow the sad tradition of having Superman be a boring, personality-less douche. At this point I'm not sure who should feel worse, the sorry bastard who was in Superman Returns or anyone associated with Smallville.

This is an interesting article, and not because it is somehow shocking that Goldman Sachs and Stratfor cultivate activists around the world. The greatest American power is money. Wealth is easier move, easier to deploy, and far more attractive to an activist type than military force in most cases. Srdja Popovic is not unique in that the was easily flattered and cheaply purchased.

The Bronx. Jesus. Here's an idea: since trains and shit like that require constant maintenance and stuff, why don't we have a massive, nation-wide program to maintain and upgrade the transportation infrastructure in order to prevent things like this. And create jobs. And increase utility. And all that good stuff.